Guaranteeing all of our children equal access to a decent education is the most pressing civil rights issue of this era.

It’s also one of America’s most urgent economic imperatives, because unless we equip far greater numbers of our students to take on the knowledge-based jobs that the new digitalized and globalized economy rewards, this country’s ability to compete will suffer and income inequality will grow. A nation that’s poorer and less equal won’t provide much of a future for anybody.

That’s why the attention of education reformers across the country currently is focused on a Los Angeles courtroom, where former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson and a team of leading Los Angeles lawyers are pressing a suit brought on behalf of nine California students seeking to abolish the state’s system of teacher tenure. Their claim, which is being financed by a national reform group founded in Silicon Valley and called Students Matter, asserts that the tenure system subverts students’ right to an education of adequate quality by making it all but impossible to fire incompetent teachers.

Lawyers for the teachers’ unions are mounting a ferocious defense of the status quo, and however Superior Court Judge Rolf Michael Treu rules in the case, it almost inevitably will end up before the California Supreme Court. Advocates of students’ rights hope that court’s ruling will provide a template for national reform, much as the state’s high court has done for the cause of marriage equality.

Superintendent John E. Deasy — who runs the Los Angeles Unified School District, America’s second largest public school system — already has testified that because of tenure’s onerous procedural burdens, it can cost his district as much as much as $450,000 to fire even a flagrantly ineffective teacher in a process that may stretch over years. In fact, if an incompetent teacher decides to vigorously defend his or her job, the expense can rise as high as $1 million. The result, moreover, is always uncertain — no matter the facts — because every tenured teacher has the right to an ultimate appeal heard by a Sacramento board dominated by union appointees. It never has sustained a dismissal it was asked to review.

Deasy also testified that, because of this convoluted and expensive process, along with the strictures of the union-imposed seniority system, the district is forced to steer its least effective teachers into its poorest schools, where nearly all the students are Latinos or African Americans. The same is true of incompetent principals, who though they lack union protections, are almost impossible to fire under their current contract with the district.

When most of us think of teacher tenure, we think of a high-minded system designed to protect academic freedom and independent scholarly inquiry. Actually, tenure today is all about providing teachers a level of job security that workers in every other sector of our economy would find incomprehensible.

The idea of granting teachers tenure began in 19th-century America, where most teaching jobs were part of the patronage system. A new mayor or superintendent would be elected and would routinely fire all the local teachers and replace them with his supporters. It’s no accident that the country’s first local tenure systems were adopted in Massachusetts (1886) and, statewide, in New Jersey (1909) — places where machine politics flourished.

Later, the push for greater women’s rights gave the tenure movement an added boost. Most American teachers were women and they were subjected to a whole variety of arbitrary, degrading and intrusive employment conditions, including things like prohibitions against being seen on the street after certain times or strictures on their dress or hair styles. Tenure seemed like an effective remedy in an era when general employment laws were few and weakly enforced and, by 1950, 80 percent of all U.S. teachers were covered by the system.

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Today, the argument that the contemporary tenure system shortchanges students by putting teachers’ economic interests ahead of our children’s welfare need not rely on a mere clash of opinions. The spread of the public charter school movement over the past decade has provided empirical evidence that schools without unionized teachers, freed of the ironclad tenure and rigid seniority systems on which they insist, do a better job of educating students, particularly those from poor and minority households.

In Deasy’s own LAUSD, for example, a recent study by the California Charter School Association found that nonunionized charter high schools produce four times the number of graduates who have completed all college preparatory coursework as traditional schools with the tenure system do. Overall, L.A.’s charters graduate 79 percent of their high school students, as opposed to 66 percent in LAUSD’s traditional schools. Charter schools achieve these results whether their students are drawn from affluent neighborhoods or the district’s most disadvantaged areas.

As the principal of one successful Sacramento-area charter high and middle school told us, “Tenure is an antiquated system that no longer makes sense — and maybe never did. I am thrilled to currently have a group of teachers confident in their work and not afraid to work on one-year contracts, which also is what I have as principal. As a non-union shop we work in greater collaboration then any union school I ever have worked in. We are not constrained by a collective bargaining agreement, which allows us to respond more quickly to the needs of our students and to find solutions to issues as they arise.”

How about teacher retention in charters without the employee protections unions regard as essential? “Our charter has been operating for eight years and, over that time, fewer than 2 percent of our teachers have not been offered contract renewals,” the principal said.

If the tenure system were abolished, teachers still would enjoy the protections against discrimination, arbitrary dismissal or infringement of their constitutional rights to free speech that all American workers have. There was a time in our history when teachers needed added protection; that era is past. In fact, in his opening statement in the California students’ civil rights suit, the lawyer for the state’s teachers union, James M. Finberg, called tenure “an amenity, just like salary or vacation.”

Amenity is usually synonymous with luxury, and tenure is a luxury we no longer can afford to provide at the expense of our children’s educations — and our country’s future.

Richard J. Riordan is a former mayor of Los Angeles. Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.